Showing all 5 books
Lawrence A. Babb's Emerald City provides an intriguing portrait of the gemstone cutting industry of the North Indian city of Jaipur. It focuses on the ownership class consisting mainly of Jains and members of northern India's traditional trading communities. Based on oral-historical investigations of family firms, along with ethnographic observations and interviews, the book describes how the industry is organized, when and how it developed its characteristic ...
The book embodies the idea that Rajasthan's past - and hence its present - cannot be adequately comprehended from the limited perspective of any single academic discipline or approach. Instead, it celebrates the notion that the region's past is subject to many constructions, each of which can contribute to a fuller understanding of its present-day cultural and social diversity. The authors of the papers presented here represent a wide variety of disciplines - ...
This book deals with three interrelated themes: the nature of India's caste system; the special character and specific place of trading castes in Indian society; and the role of myth as a repository of socially important knowledge. A unique feature of this book is that it is based mainly on the literature published by caste and religious associations supplemented by oral material. Proposing a novel theory of the role of violence, non-violence and ritual ...
What does it mean to worship beings that one believes are completely indifferent to, and entirely beyond the reach, of any form of worship whatsoever? What the implications of such a relationship with sacred beings for the religious life of a community? Using these questions as his point of departure, Babb explores the ritual culture of image-worshiping Svetambar Jains. Jainism is, aside from Buddhism, the only surviving example of India's ancient non-Vedic ...
The essays in this book represent the fruits of an interdisciplinary study of four temples in Rajasthan jointly conducted by Lawrence A. Babb (anthropology), John E. Cort (religious studies), and Michael W. Meister (art history). The temples were chosen because they are both very ancient and also vibrantly functioning today. The results of the authors' research dramatically vindicate the idea that when disciplines are combined, the result is greater than the sum ...